FOR THE COLLECTOR WHO HATES COLLECTING

The other day my neighbour was at the back door.

“You’re not going to believe this mate, but I was wondering if I could borrow a hammer? Of course I’ve got loads of my own but they’re all, um, somewhere else. Any old thing will do.”

He was looking slightly sheepish, which is understandable because he’s a builder, so he ought to have things like hammers.

“No worries” I said, and popped over to the awkward cupboard. That’s the place where you keep things that are too good to be in the shed, but don’t really suit being in the house either.

“Ta.” Bill turned away with the tool, stopped and hefted it in his hand. “Nice hammer!” Then he gave it a second puzzled look. “If you don’t mind me asking, what the heck are you doing with an Estwing hammer?”

Unfortunately the emphasis was on ‘you’, rather than ‘Estwing’.

“You mean, why don’t I have a nasty old hammer with a shapeless wooden handle? Why do I, a self confessed DIY incompetent, have a pristine example of the most expensive, finely balanced, professional, lifetime-guaranteed tool on the market?”

“Well, yeah.”

Bill knows I stay away from anything larger than O gauge. I consider a vacuum cleaner to be a power tool, wear gloves to fill the windscreen washer bottle and avoid anything approaching unsupervised DIY. So I continued to explain; “Actually I hate hammers. Horrible, dangerous things. I loathe them so much that, even if I only have to use one once a year, I need to know I’m having the best hammer experience I could possibly get.”

It’s the same with any tool. Take the internet for example. If you hate computers and want nothing to do with them, you need the fastest, most bullet-proof broadband connection and PC on the market. You also want to be really good at using the net, so you can get it all done in the shortest possible time, then get back to playing with your toys.

If you love driving, you’ll drive anything from a Mercedes to a ride-on mower and enjoy it. If you hate driving you need the most reliable, economical and safe car known to man. Ironically, the more you hate a task, the better should be the tool you use to achieve it.

If we apply this logic to collecting, it follows that the more assiduously you labour over your collection, the more you must hate it. Most of us have a relaxed, healthy approach to buying and selling collectables as the opportunity arises. It’s easy come, easy go; what’s for you will not go by you. Sure we can obsess a bit occasionally, but that’s just letting off steam. If you enjoy grubbing around car boot sales, or going to loads of swapmeets and rooting through boxes on your hands and knees, you’re the salt of the collecting earth. You’re happy to clean and renovate, swap with friends and fill the rest of your time on ebay, if you have any time left, that is.

On the other hand, some collectors don’t really like collecting. They want a collection to fill some sort of inner need to possess, but they can’t be bothered with legwork; they need to get it over and done with as fast as possible. They’ll tend to buy at auction, preferably through a third party so even the decision is made remotely by someone who’s already vetted it for them.

There’s no need to actually handle the items at all; the collector with the perfect complete collection doesn’t even need to look at it any more. If you can afford all the mintiest, tastiest collectables, they end up with the glass cabinet; the whole shooting match in one bristling presentation which says; “I’ve been there and done it. I not only have the T shirt, I have the point of sale material which promoted the T shirt. I want for nothing.”

Not everyone can afford to do this, so the next tier of collectors buys new toys instead. This is as easy as it gets. Go to the shop, pick up bag, walk out. It also performs a useful service by providing lots of stock for us dealers to buy back one day. Maybe. If we want it. Again, no need to open the packaging, just stack ‘em up on the shelf like a toy shop.

So where do us dealers fit in to this scenario? Of course the ultimate conclusion is that we must hate toys even more than wealthy completists. We’re buying everything, whether we like it or not. We keep it by us at all times. We lay it out on tables and try to persuade other collectors to take it off our hands.

If your collection is a chaotic mixture of styles, spread through the house, you’re probably well adjusted in relation to your collection. But if you have everything lit behind plate glass like in a museum, or in the back of your car on the way to a toy fair, maybe it’s time to stop and ask yourself; do you really hate collecting that much?

www.swapmeetpete.com